Forms of Dominance

Originally published in 1992, as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction and new preface, Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise examines the complex experience of colonial domination, social reaction, and physical adaptation within the built environment of regions such as Morocco, Eastern Europe, India, Guatemala and East Africa, and provides a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on the colonial experience.

Author Biography

Nezar AlSayyad is an architect, planner, urban historian and a public intellectual. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Planning, at the University of California at Berkeley where he was Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies for two decades. In 1988, AlSayyad co-founded the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE) and served as its first President for two decades, and he still serves as the Editor of the Association’s highly acclaimed peer-reviewed journal Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review (TDSR). AlSayyad writings have spanned many disciplines including research on tradition, heritage and globalization and their connection to the built environment. He is the author, co-author, or editor of many books among them: Forms of Dominance (1992); Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage (2001); The End of Tradition (2003); Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (2006); The Fundamentalist City (2012); and Traditions: The Real, the Hyper and the Virtual in the Built Environment (2014); and the major Encyclopedic volume Cairo: The Routledge Handbook of Histories, Representations and Discourses, 2023. AlSayyad is the recipient of many grants and awards for his research and in 2008, the University of California at Berkeley awarded him, the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest honor Berkeley bestows on its faculty. In 2015, AlSayyad was awarded a Distinguished Guggenheim Fellowship.